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On July 24, Russian company ROSA proudly announced the immediate availability of a major release of their ROSA Desktop Fresh GNU/Linux operating system built around a highly customized KDE4 desktop environment.

The last time I ran Mageia was in 2013. I wrote two articles about Mageia 3 and its predecessor Mageia 2 in these very pages. I had written several articles about Mandriva for years before eventually moving on to openSUSE, Fedora and Debian so I'm not unfamiliar with Mageia's roots.

The Mageia 5 Linux distribution, which launched June 19, provides new tools, improved stability and overall ease of use. The Mageia Linux distro was first formed in September 2010 as a fork of French Linux distribution Mandriva. While Mandriva as a commercial entity ceased operation in May of this year, Mageia is alive and well, continuing on its mission of creating a user-friendly desktop-focused Linux distribution. New features in Mageia 5 include support for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) hardware, which enables Mageia to run on a broader array of systems than previously. Historically, Mandriva was focused on the KDE Linux desktop as the default. In addition to KDE, Mageia offers users an easy installation choice of other desktops, including GNOME 3.14, Cinnamon 2.4.5 and Xfce 4.12. With Mageia 5, the Btrfs next-generation Linux file system is now fully supported, providing users with a robust file system capability. Helping users move from Microsoft's Windows operating system is also part of Mageia 5, which has a Windows settings import feature. eWEEK examines key highlights of the Mageia 5 Linux distribution release.

After more than one year of development, the Mageia community is very proud to finally deliver this long-awaited release, Mageia 5. This release announcement is a big sigh of relief, an “At last!” that comes straight from the heart of the weary – tired as one can be after long days of hard but rewarding work.

And still, we chose to take our time to fix major issues and have a high quality release, without rushing it. Maybe our best release so far, taking into account the impressive work that was done on the installer, both to add new features and to get rid of old bugs.

FOSS Force has learned that Mageia will soon officially announce the release of the stable version of Mageia 5, most likely later today. According to a source within the organization, the ISO images were pushed to the distro’s main mirror at about 7 P.M. EST yesterday. According to our source, the developers are now just waiting for the images to be available on all mirrors before making the official announcement.

A few hours ago, OpenMandriva dropped a tweet on their official Twitter account asking users their opinion on the matter of maintaining the i586 (32-bit) builds of the distribution or not, which was discussed a while ago.

The company hasn’t released a new version of Mandriva Linux since 2011 and laid off most of its developers years ago, but it’s now been completely liquidated. That doesn’t mean Mandriva’s vision for Linux is dead, however—the Mageia project, founded by former Mandriva developers, picked up the torch years ago and has been carrying it ever since. It’s not the only successor to Mandriva, either.

Mandriva is certainly a rather unique company; it has also been the company for which I was privileged enough to work two times, one in 2003 as an intern for several months. Back then I used to handle the national resellers’network. The second time was ten years afterwards in 2012 and 2013, this time as a consultant helping them with their Open Source strategy and their marketing activities. One can see how this company is rather special for me. During my last “tenure” there I got to know what we now know to be the “last” team of Mandriva, its last incarnation as a company. Last week, we learned that the company has been liquidated, which essentially means not just that the company filed for bankruptcy, but that the company as such exists no more. Mandriva went several times (three times?) into bankruptcy, but was never obviously liquidated. At this stage I have no idea what became of the assets, nor its subsidiaries.mandriva-logo-opts

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